Sony VAIO P: Almost 3.5 minutes from boot to browser

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What do you get when you combine a 1.33GHz CPU, a 4200rpm hard drive, 2GB of RAM, and Windows Vista Home in a tiny computer? As Akihabara found out, you get to wait almost three and a half minutes to get on the internet when booting the machine.

To be fair, they loaded McAfee’s antivirus software onto the VAIO P — which I propose is pure insanity – but the fact remains that the decision to include Vista on such a low-powered machine is mind boggling, especially since everything from a hardware design standpoint is truly a sight to behold. The big 1600×768 resolution, the relatively usable keyboard, the take-anywhere form factor, the 3G connection – they’re all wonderful, but the whole getup is overshadowed by sluggish performance. Remember that the idea of a netbook is to be able to open it up quickly, check some stuff, maybe type a few e-mails, and then close it back down.

Broken down, Akihabara found that the actual boot time into Vista was just over one minute, plus another minute for everything to load up into a usable state. Once you start adding stuff like Office, widgets, antivirus software, and anything else that automatically starts when the computer starts, you’re up over three minutes. Here’s a video of the entire boot process:

Of course being the diligent geeks that we all are, any one of us would strip down auto-starting applications to a bare minimum, right? It’d be interesting to see how quickly the machine would run with everything cranked way, way down. It might be even more interesting to see how easy it’d be to load the thing up with XP or some version of Linux.